When proper names become everyday words

People’s names show up in the English language in surprising places, such as "pasteurized milk" and "ham sandwiches."

University of Michigan Professor of English Anne Curzan and Weekend Edition host Rina Miller discuss eponyms, or words that are derived from proper names, on this week’s edition of That’s What They Say.

The verb pasteurized is an eponym. It comes into the English language in 1881 from the name Louis Pasteur, who invented the pasteurization process.

Sandwich is also an eponym.

“We think that the word comes from John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich. He was a gambler, and once he spent 24 hours at the table gambling, and all he had to eat was meat between two slices of bread," Curzan explains. Thus, the sandwich was named after him.

The adjective ritzy is yet another eponym. Unrelated to the crackers, ritzy came from hotels.

“César Ritz, a Swiss hotelier, founded many ritzy hotels, including the Hotel Ritz in Paris,” Curzan describes. “Because those hotels were quite nice, we derived the adjective from his name.”

Finally, sideburns comes from General Ambrose Everett Burnside, a leader of the Union Army during the American Civil War. General Burnside was known for his bushy side-whiskers, which were called burnsides by 1875.

When General Burnside died, people forgot where the word burnside came from. This facial hair was also referred to as side-whiskers, so the word was reversed to the modern term sideburns.

If your name was an eponym, what would it mean? Let us know by leaving a comment on our Facebook page or on our website!

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It seems hard to believe that we as speakers can tolerate a word meaning two opposite things at the same time.

Host Rina Miller and University of Michigan English Professor Anne Curzan reveal some auto-antonyms, or words that mean their opposites, on this week’s edition of That’s What They Say.

Curzan begins with an example that Jesse Sheidlower, the North American Editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, shared with her.

In the sentence, “Mary and her partner had just moved in upstairs, and their boxes lay on the kitchen floor still unpacked,” unpacked is an auto-antonym. It should mean there’s nothing in the boxes, but it actually means the boxes are full.

“For many of us, in that sentence unpacked means un-unpacked,” Curzan explains.

The list of auto-antonyms continues. The verb dust can mean “to put dust or sugar on” or “to take dust off.” Similarly, the verb sanction can mean “to permit or to allow with legal authority” or “to impose a penalty on,” which suggests not permitting.

Most of the time the final -ed on words is not pronounced as its own syllable, but then every once in a while, it is.

This week on That’s What They Say, Host Rina Miller and University of Michigan English Professor Anne Curzan discuss tricky -ed endings and the history of this suffix’s pronunciation.

Historically, -ed was always pronounced as its own syllable. In the 18th century, Jonathan Swift voiced his desire to preserve the final -ed in his book, A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue. Swift wrote, “By leaving our a vowel to save a syllable, we form so jarring a sound, and so difficult to utter, that I have often wondered how it could ever obtain.”

Nowadays, we rarely pronounce -ed separately. But what about problematic words that can be pronounced either way, like beloved?

“Usually when it is an adjective, you would say it as two syllables,” Curzan explains regarding beloved. “But if it’s a noun, you would say belov-ed and pronounce it as its own syllable.”

Parsing used to be restricted to sentences, but now we can parse all kinds of things.

This week on That’s What They Say, host Rina Miller and University of Michigan English Professor Anne Curzan talk about the verbs to parse and to vet.

Parsing originally came from the Latin noun pars, meaning “parts” as in “parts of speech.” When parse appeared in the English language in the 16th century, it referred to analyzing a sentence syntactically by breaking the phrase down to its parts of speech.

However, by the 18th century, parse came to mean “examining something closely by breaking it into component parts,” or even “to understand.” Now, parse has yet another definition to computer programmers, meaning “examining strings.”

On this week’s edition of That’s What They Say, host Rina Miller and University of Michigan English Professor Anne Curzan discuss the changing use of because and slash.

On Tuesday, an article in The Atlantic by Megan Garber brought attention to a new usage of because. Because can now be followed by a noun, adjective or gerund like in the phrase, “Because Internet.”

“Because is traditionally a subordinating conjunction, so it requires a clause after it, as in, ‘I’m late because I was watching videos on YouTube,’” Curzan describes. “Or it can be a compound preposition, like, ‘I’m late because of the traffic.’”

Today, thanks to the evolution of language on the Internet, people are writing and saying phrases like: “I’m late because YouTube,” “I’m not going out because tired,” or “I’m late because running.”